Glynn, R. (2020). Porosity and Its Discontents: Approaching Naples in Critical Theory

Glynn, R. (2020). Porosity and its Discontents: Approaching Naples in Critical Theory. Cultural Critique, 107, 63-98. https://doi.org/10.1353/cul.2020.0012 Peer reviewed version Link to published version (if available): 10.1353/cul.2020.0012 Link to publication record in Explore Bristol Research PDF-document This is the author accepted manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via University of Minnesota Press at https://muse.jhu.edu/article/755187 . Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. University of Bristol - Explore Bristol Research General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ Porosity and its Discontents: Approaching Naples in Critical Theory Naples has long been subject to intense cultural and critical interrogation. Since the flourishing of the Grand Tour in the eighteenth century, artists, travelers, poets, journalists, essayists and intellectuals have sought to articulate and make sense of their reactions to a city that has often provoked contradictory responses and been experienced as an assault on the senses. The substantial body of cultural production generated by visitors to Naples is complemented by a rich body of cultural production emerging from within Naples itself, and by the extensive corpus of studies of the city emerging from diverse fields of the social sciences (politics, anthropology, urban studies, criminology, etc.). Of particular importance in relation to the latter is the body of late nineteenth-century work known as meridionalismo, which characterized the Italian South – and Naples as its ultimate expression – as an uncivilized and barbaric place, in thrall to poverty and crime and in need of urgent corrective intervention on the part of the more civilized and modern north of the new nation-state.1 However, while eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of Naples have been subject to intense critical scrutiny and detailed historical analysis, their more recent counterparts remain comparatively neglected.2 This article addresses a small but highly influential corpus of work within the wider body of twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural representations of Naples: that of critical theory. 1 The foundational text of meridionalismo, Pasquale Villari’s Lettere meridionali [Southern Letters] (1875), opens with the problem of organised crime in Naples, characterised as a natural and inevitable consequence of depressed economic and social conditions. On the underlying moralism of Villari’s writings and its legacy, see Dickie (1999, p. 56) and Moe (2002, pp. 228-36); on the emergence of the moral discourse in the 1860s, see Moe (2002, pp. 170- 76). On the ready alignment between Naples and the South as a whole in the minds of nineteenth-century Italians, see Moe (2002, pp. 40-41). 2 Though individual studies address particular aspects of Neapolitan culture, no comprehensive study of 20th- and 21st-century discourses about and representations of the city exists. 1 Such work – which is broadly philosophical in nature but provides also the kind of theoretically and empirically engaged analysis more characteristic of cultural critique – is widely cited within the fields of philosophy, cultural studies and urban studies; it is also readily deployed in critical analyses of cultural representations of Naples. Critical theory not only interrogates the city and its culture but, in seeking to provide an explanatory account of the same, also produces a series of images and discourses that – no less than its literary, cinematic or artistic equivalents – constitute cultural representations in their own right. Unlike its more overtly cultural counterparts, however, critical theory has evaded systematic scholarly analysis. It has passed uninterrogated into the field of critical analysis of cultural representations of Naples, where it has silently influenced and colored interpretations of Neapolitan culture and cultural production without itself becoming subject to appropriate critical enquiry. Only by studying critical theory as a field of representation in and of itself can we fully understand the premises and assumptions underlying the discourses and constructions that have been so influential in shaping wider cultural understandings of Naples and in determining the terms of scholarly engagement with the city and its implications. The field of critical theory interrogations of Naples is confined to two historical moments. The first wave comprises the writings of the Frankfurt-based philosopher-intellectuals who gathered in the Naples area between 1923 and 1927.3 The corpus includes Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’ seminal essay, entitled ‘Naples’ (1924), which becomes the corner stone of the critical and cultural construction of Naples as ‘porous’; it also includes Ernst Bloch’s extension 3 Beyond the strict parameters of critical theory addressed here, there exists a wider bibliography of critical reflections on diverse aspects of Neapolitan life and culture. Among the more notable contributions are Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1974) characterization of Naples as an ‘enormous carnivorous existence’; Maria Antonietta Macciocchi’s (1973) acute reflections on the socio-political dynamics of the city in the early 1970s; and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1976) exploration of Neapolitan character. 2 and critique of Benjamin and Lacis’ theoretical frame in the essay, ‘Italy and Porosity’ (1926), and Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s brief reflection, ‘The Ideal of the Broken: On Neapolitan Technology’ (1926). The second wave, instead, begins with the ‘discovery’ of Benjamin and Lacis’ essay in Italy in the 1990s, and its entry into cultural consciousness as a key point of reference for a new body of critical work addressing Naples.4 That body of work includes Venetian philosopher Massimo Cacciari’s interview essay, ‘Non potete massacrarmi Napoli’, published in an edited volume on Naples entitled La città porosa [The Porous City] (1992), and a series of reflections by Naples-based cultural studies scholar Iain Chambers, which culminate in the substantial essay, ‘Naples: A Porous Modernity’, published in Mediterranean Crossings (2008).5 The development of critical interest in Naples in the 1990s is bound up with a series of socio-economic and political factors, as well as with distinct intellectual developments. Long seen as a synonym for urban dysfunction, Naples underwent a dramatic transformation in the 1990s, following the implementation of a radical program of reform on the part of the city’s first directly elected mayor, Antonio Bassolino (1993-2001).6 Although subsequent events would later call into question the validity of the ‘Neapolitan Renaissance’ moniker associated with the Bassolino administration, the dramatic regeneration of the historic center, the reinvigoration of civil society, and the notable reduction in bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption all served to rehabilitate the city’s reputation and garner significant acclaim for Naples among urban 4 Predating the ‘discovery’ noted here is a single article by philosopher Bruno Moroncini published in the Neapolitan edition of L’Unità newspaper in November 1982. See Demarco (2007, p. 66). 5 Excluded from analysis is Serenella Iovino’s (2016) engagement with Benjamin and Lacis’ essay, on the grounds that its primary interest lies not in the essay’s understanding of Naples but in the potential application of its theorization of porosity to the field of ecocriticism. 6 Dines (2012, p. 7) writes that ‘over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Naples was seen to have reached its nadir and for many in Italy and abroad the city became a synonym for urban decay’, while Santore (2010, pp. 262-63) reports that ‘By the early 1990s, […] Naples was depicted as a city without laws or morals, a land of ungovernable people totally devoid of civic sense’. 3 regeneration scholars and urban theorists alike.7 The positive profile of Naples at a time of national political crisis and amid a major reassessment of Italy’s place in the geopolitical order following the fall of the Berlin Wall propelled the city to the forefront of debate about the future orientation of the country. No longer compelled by the ideological and economic conditions of the Cold War to orient itself exclusively northwards and westwards, Italy began to explore the potential of its Mediterranean position in the context of the changed geopolitical and globalized order. In intellectual terms, critical interest in Naples in the 1990s was sparked by a broad renewal of scholarly attention to the work of Walter Benjamin and by the advent of new theoretical discourses and frameworks of notable relevance to the Naples and its theorization. One such framework emerging within Italy in the 1980s was that of neomeridionalismo, which constituted a revisionist approach to what had formerly been considered an undifferentiated Italian South, and which encouraged identification of the specificities, nuances and complexities of diverse southern realities.8 The subsequent emergence of Mediterranean Studies, which gained particular traction in Italy following the publication of Predrag Matvejevic’s Breviario mediterraneo (1987) [Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (1999)], provides another important framework. Premised upon the ‘replacement of the concept of the nation

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